Former Barcelona youth coach Sergio Lobera is backing their move for Girona midfielder Oriol Romeu.
Lobera worked with Romeu in Barca's academy before the midfielder left for Chelsea.
He now is coach of Odisha in India and told Sport: "I was very surprised by his winning character, his hard-working spirit and his maturity unbefitting his age. All these factors added up to the fact that football-wise, he lived up to the high expectations I had set for him. Going from Espanyol to Barça is never easy because the idea of the game was different. He needed a period of adaptation but it was quite short, his ability to assimilate concepts was brutal and he did it in a meteoric way.
"Oriol Romeu was already a very complete player but what I worked on most with him was knowing how to manage the tempo in defence-attack and attack-defence transitions. He has always been a very intense player and a duel winner but I tried to instil in him more calmness when playing once we had won the ball back. It was important to know how to slow down when we had control of the ball.
"La Masia helped him a lot to acquire concepts of the Barça style. Growing up in the Barça youth academy is a luxury because you have the best resources and the best teammates to help you progress. You also have to think that overcoming so much competition is not easy, only the strongest can keep going and Oriol never gave up. And the fact is that Romeu is a player who believes in himself, being at Barça didn't change his personality at all and he continued to work very hard to grow.
"Sometimes you don't know what is ideal to be a complete player. I think, for example, that the fact that Busquets arrived late in the Barça youth system gave him an edge that other Barça players don't have. The same thing happened to Oriol when he spent years away from Barça, being in teams that are not so dominant you have to become strong in aspects that you don't need when you compete as a Blaugrana.
"He's a player with the ideal footballing profile and the mentality to be at the level of a club like Barça. I also think that with a coach like Xavi, he could grow a lot. For the professionalism that Oriol always shows I think he can still perform at a high level for many more years."
